Sidney D. Gamble Photographs
Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968), an avid amateur photographer, began taking pictures in China during his first trip to the country with his family in 1908. He returned three more times between 1917 and 1932 and continued photographing the daily life of Chinese citizens. A sociologist and renowned China scholar, he traveled throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside. Gamble used a few of the photographs from his extensive collection in his scholarly publications and in slide lectures, but the majority of images were never published or exhibited during his lifetime. The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection marks the first comprehensive public presentation of this large body of work that includes photographs of Korea, Japan, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Russia.
The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946
The Harvard-Yenching Library holds some 5,000 photographs and 10,000 negatives taken by Hedda Hammer Morrison (1908–1991) while resident in Beijing from 1933 to 1946. The photographs, mounted in thematic albums prepared by Mrs. Morrison, and the negatives, were bequeathed to the Harvard-Yenching Library, “the best permanent home for her vision of a city and people that she loved [Alastair Morrison].” All of the photographs contained in the 28 albums assembled by Hedda Morrison have been cataloged and digitized and can be viewed in VIA (Visual Information Access), the union catalog of visual resources at Harvard. This site provides information about the collection and strategies for effectively searching for Hedda Morrison photographs in VIA. Use the menu at the top to navigate through the various sections of this site. Hedda Morrison studied photography in her native Germany, and from 1933 to 1938 managed Hartung’s Photo Shop in Beijing. From 1938 until she and her husband left China in 1946, Morrison worked as a freelance photographer, selling individual prints or thematic albums of her work and creating photographs for other people’s books on China. Her photographs document lifestyles, trades, handicrafts, landscapes, religious practices, and architectural structures that in many cases have changed or have been destroyed.
Visualising China Blog
Visualising China is a web-based resource that allows users to explore more than 9,000 digitised images of historical photographs of China taken between 1870 and 1950. This tool, aimed at both researchers and more general users, brings information from related collections together with an interface that offers cross-searching and intuitive ways to filter image, video and textual resources according to time and geography. Users can also visualise the connections between resources in the collection, as well as seeing images in their geographic context.
Historical Photos of China
Based at the University of Bristol, the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ project began work in 2006. It grew from being a focused strand in an Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project on the ‘History of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service’ into an initiative that searched for material far beyond descendants of the staff of the Customs Service. The project now locates, digitises, and publishes online photographs of China held, largely, in private hands outside the country. Although there are some sets of material from institutional repositories, the principal sources of our materials are families living outside China who have historical connections with it, typically this involves a family history of living and working there. Our sources are families who were involved in public service, business, missionary work, police or foreign armed forces. Most of our photographers were ‘amateurs’, although we have some material from journalists, and much from individuals who applied themselves seriously to the art of photography. The collection also includes much material that was commissioned, bought or otherwise acquired, photographs not actually taken by those within whose albums or boxes they came to be preserved. Our aim is to help make this virtual photographic archive of modern China publicaly available, without cost, and with limited restriction on use for non-commercial purposes.
To find out more about the project’s various activities please look at our project blog. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Sina Weibo, and you can find a short film about the project here, and a BBC Radio 4 programme about us here. We have held several exhibitions of our materials since 2007: ‘Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections’ took place in London, Bath, and Durham in 2007-2008, and Bristol in 2009. Collaborators in Spain held an exhibition of photographs from the collection in Pamplona in November 2009. During February, March and April 2011, fifty images from Historical Photographs of China collections were exhibited in three different venues in Navarre, Spain. This exhibition in the Basque country was organised by the Red Navarra de Estudios Chinos (Navarre Network of Chinese Studies), and the Universidad Pública de Navarra (Navarre Public University). In 2013 in collaboration with communications teams at the British Embassy in Beijing, and Consulate-General in Chongqing we held two new exhibitions; and in March 2015 a selection of the images was showcased at the GREAT Festival of Creativity in Shanghai, organised by the UK government’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. We have also been showcased in a British Library exhibition held at the National Museum of China, and through an exhibition at Nanjing University.